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A senior writer for Sports Illustrated, S. L. Price was running out of steam and getting that stuck-in-flypaper feeling, commonly known as a midlife crisis. Having turned 40, he needed a change. He used a competing job offer as leverage in persuading his boss to let him set up shop in the south of France to cover playing fields on the Continent and elsewhere. Price, his wife and their three young children made the move in 2003, when our relations with France were at their nadir and Americans were rechristening their French fries.

The sports reportage in this gracefully written book is strong enough to make the sometimes-dated events seem timeless. Writers who aim to fix images of athletes and games in our collective memory need to find fresh angles, just like great photographers. Price is a virtuoso at locating unconventional entries into common topics. He travels to Switzerland to cover the Austrian skiing sensation Hermann Maier, who is competing in the Super Bowl of slalom events, but ends up gathering his impressions of Maier by tracking the American downhiller Daron Rahlves.

The seasoned reporter behind this memoir is a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price’s personal paragon, Pete Hamill. Adherents of this approach drop all pretense to objectivity and are loath to dismiss any detail as irrelevant. For example, in his reckoning of the 2004 Summer Olympics, Price spends paragraphs on the travails of driving in Athens; when he’s in Pakistan, taking in a historic series of cricket matches with India, he prattles on about bedbugs and a broken air-conditioner. And yet it all works to capture the tension of the event and to create a coherent and absorbing composition.

We Americans are well known for our narcissistic view of world politics. The same, of course, could be said for our perspective on athletics. Price’s stories offer cross-cultural instruction on the meaning of sports. One French writer suggests that unlike their American counterparts, European fans do not appreciate athletes who express an overwhelming desire to stand out. Price’s notes on Lance Armstrong’s quest for a sixth Tour de France victory are also revelatory of Old World attitudes toward sports and of the fact that, for all his cursing of the news media, Armstrong clearly fed off the fires of his controversy with the French press.

“Far Afield” is filled with hairpin turns into Price’s personal and professional past. Sometimes the two are tethered together, as in the case of his musings on his dead father, who virtually haunts the book, and a breakfast once shared with Ted Williams and his son, John Henry. Price covered Michael Jordan when they were both students at the University of North Carolina, and his curious tête-à-têtes with His Airness over the years are amusing to sit in on.

À la “Being John Malkovich,” sportswriters always strive to get behind the eyes of elite athletes, as though literally to see how they can perform at such heights and with such stakes. Price astutely observes: “Each of the great athletes or coaches I’ve covered — Dean Smith, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Sampras, Bill Walsh, Tony La Russa, Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, Barry Sanders, Shaquille O’Neal, Agassi, Tiger Woods — bears at heart a cruelty that, unlike those of us who are taught to conceal it from an early age, is rewarded each time it’s revealed. ... Boiled down, you are beating another man, revealing his weakness before millions.”

Price is an inveterate and admitted self-dramatizer, and his tendency to try to convert the likes of airport annoyances and shopping trips to Ikea into “The Arabian Nights” can occasionally be vexing. But whenever he writes about sports — or about the craft of writing — he hits it over the fence.

FAR AFIELD

A Sportswriting Odyssey.

By S. L. Price.

Illustrated. 247 pp. The Lyons Press/The Globe Pequot Press. $24.95.

Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, is a boxing writer and trainer.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 722 of the New York edition with the headline: Euro-Sport. Today's Paper|Subscribe